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Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month
(www.techspot.com)
fuck hypertext
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
131 points (92.3% liked)
Technology
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"What if, now hear me out, what if we throw out the baby and the bathwater!?"
Article is fluff, just read the source of info: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/whatsnext/
I like built in ad blocking and further privacy protection. I'd like to see more of it, to firmly establish where firefox stands in the big tech war against personal freedom.
Unpopular opinion - for me Firefox is a joy to use. I appreciate that we still have a strong alternative to web monopoly. Sure things could be better but when was this not true? I've used it for many many years and there's nothing on the horizon that I would consider as alternative.
I don't think it's that impopular. I've never switched to Chrome or any derivative. I never felt a need to migrate, and with Google tightening rules on extensions, I feel even better standing by FF.
I've loathed the higher management giving themselves raises while market share was in free fall, but I have no complains about that piece of software. Over time, all the performance and weight issues have been dramatically improved, so what's greener on the other side??
I read this blog post from jrconlin about leaving Mozilla recently. I really appreciate the tone and insight and I think he hits the nail on the head about their leadership.
Are Firefox fork users not considered firefox users? Without Firefox, the forks cease to exist. LibreWolf, etc users should be considered Firefox users.
We don't need ai for browsing
Really hoping for the best for this browser. They absolutely need to drop ai as well as reassess their budget distribution. They are vastly overpaying their ceo.
I personally think the report of bleeding users is exaggerated, Most people I know(yes its a biased sample group) have left chrome, and its 50-49 split between brave and firefox, with the 1% being on safari(this metrics includes mobile users) and most of these people have turned on some kind of do not track/do not send analytics checkmark, plus people who are miffed about firefox switch to something based on firefox, which imo are just more users of firefox.
Stop cramming AI into the browser and you might get some people back.
Was on FF for years and then they announced AI so i went to WaterFox and have LibreWolf ready just in case WF starts fucking around.
I hope you know that Waterfox and LibreWolf have their fate tied to Firefox, right?
These aren't hard forks. They consume the engineering efforts of Firefox itself in order to stay relevant. They aren't developing their own solutions to web standards and CVE patches, except in extreme circumstances.
If Mozilla loses funding for their engineering organization, which is the grand majority of their entire budget, Firefox stops keeping up to date with web standards and security patches and rapidly falls behind. Leaving just Chrome as the only option, or Safari, but I know none of us want to choose Safari.
All the soft forks go with it.
Now, if all the soft forks abandoned their own projects in order to pool their efforts together to maintain a single fork in this scenario, then they might make some success in staving off irrelevancy, which, instead of becoming irrelevant in the course of a couple of years, might take half a decade instead. Which does leave enough time to cobble together enough contributors and a large enough project to keep it afloat.
But I highly doubt that all these various forks will pool their engineering efforts into a single project, at least not immediately and at least not willingly.
If Mozilla loses funding for their engineering organization....
It's pretty safe to assume they won't.
Mozilla's funding is provided by Google. It's not going to dry up while Google needs to maintain the appearance of a non-monopoly. It's also the reason Mozilla is so careless with their spending.
Why would that be safe to assume? As far as I can see, the US admin wouldn't bat an eye if Google had a monopoly on the internet standards.
Just going off a quick glance here I can see the latest Fox corpos buying Roku. There was the Bytedance merger too.
I'm not trying to argue with you, but you seems to have high hopes, and I would like to have some hope myself if you can explain your reasons to me?
Companies have a long history of funding their competitors to avoid looking like monopolies. Microsoft did it for Apple. And while the Trump administration has been allowing more mergers than ever before, two competitors in a single space collapsing into one would be very unprecedented.
But even in a scenario worse than if Google stops contributing to Mozilla, they'll have three years worth of stored money to draw upon
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I'm bought in. Whatever Firefox is doing is better than Chrome in every way. The VPN feature is useless though. I can't get any website that I actually care about to work with it turned on. Same with the email and phone number masks (Mozilla features not Firefox specific). Can't use any Mozilla email/phone mask to work with 90% of the services I use. Amazing ideas in theory, but in practice they're mostly useless.
Dont believe the article at all. Everyone I talk to is switching back to Firefox. I never left.
Mozilla's own numbers tells the same story. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
Didn't know they have those data. Some c/dataisbeautiful material here!
Some things are really interesting. I'd expect more people with extensions, but the majority don't use. I'd also expect more linux users, but it seems the popularity among linux users is about same level as the general users. It's also interesting to see a reasonable amount of 32 bit systems
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Both are true, I'm not sure I'd call it "millions per month" though...
Usage has been slowly dropping year on year since 2022 but also this year usage is up
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The Firefox forks are just so damned good. Zen, Librewolf, and Waterfox are just great.
This assumes a broad misunderstanding I keep seeing here on Lemmy.
These forks rely heavily on Firefox core engineering and development, which, if Firefox dies off, they will no longer have access to, thus relegating them to history as well.
These are not hard forks. These are forks that maintain release parity with Firefox itself, absorbing the grand majority of all engineering efforts into Firefox into their own projects, meaning they are strongly tied to Firefox's success or demise. And "strongly" is an understatement. We're talking 95 to 99% of Firefox engineering efforts are consumed by these forks.
So somewhere from 1 to 5% of the engineering effort these forks rely on to continue to stay relevant, secure, performant, and up to modern web standards is provided by their contributors.
Keeping Firefox up-to-date with web standards and security is an engineering nightmare. I mean, just look at Safari.
Having forks is awesome, but sitting back on our haunches, believing that they are safe, independent browser developments is absurd.
I understand the relationship between Firefox and the forks. What I meant by my comment is that I suspect that a lot of their loss in users might be because of people going to the forks rather than the main product.
I totally agree and thought about going back to plain Firefox multiple times, but I would like to argue that if you can do it better than Mozilla at basically 0 budget, that is kind of on Mozilla.
Take Librewolf and Ironfox. They have clearly shown that there is an audience for hardened/privacy first Firefox. Mozilla can capture this audience very easily: Offer it yourself.
I really don't feel like researching all the settings I need to change to arrive at a Librewolf-ish level of privacy. I also think Librewolf could still do better. And I think Mozilla should do it better than them.
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I don't think that's what they implied, but you're right. And it sucks.
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The problem is that they take their sweet time incorporating security updates.
The more cash Creepy Goose injects into Mozilla, the higher the CEO's salary will be and the less users there will be. I'd like to thank Mozilla for being a money-sink for about 15 years now. It's like Creepy Goose has been carrying a tiny ball and chain just so that authorities can say "oh yeah, they have competition".
Once LadyBird reaches v1, Mozilla will be in deep shit as it won't be necessary to pay them as a token competitor anymore.
Every month there are new webpages breaking on FF, if this trend doesn't stop, then it's curtains. (people increasingly don't test their crappy JS code on FF)
Well of course Firefox is dying. That's why their leadership was captured by people who used to work at Meta, Alphabet, and Microslop.
Leaving where? There is no safe harbor. You are using WebKit, Gecko, or Chromium and thats final.
I've started using canada post.
Falkon will be viable aaaaany day now!
Sarcasm aside, I do hope it picks up steam. It's a nice browser.
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I love zenbrowser, just try it and you'll see why, I've left too many comments in the past detailing it, if you like swapping workspaces and having them organized without pausing all of your tabs everytime, and having essential tabs that stick around no matter what for easy access, like im jut rambling idk, it made me enjoy browsing the web again since I don't lose tabs anymore, everything is organized in folders, pinned tabs, or essential tabs
Easily the best browser for widescreens too, vertical tabs take like a day or so to get used to, can't go back now tho
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They're about to get a BIG bump in usership, when Manivest V2 goes dark.
I'd like to think so, but I doubt it. For the average user Manifest V2 has been gone for about a year. Sure there were commands or preferences hidden away to re-enable it, but nothing user friendly.
Maybe we'll see a tiny bump, but I expect everyone who was going to switch has already switched.
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